The Gift in Antiquity
Brown University
May 2-4, 2010
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This Conference is OPEN to the Public: Please visit the Registration Site >>> (link in progress) to participate.
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Temple of Isis at Pompeii (Image by Michael Tinkler, at flickr.com)
“The Gift in Antiquity” Is an International Conference to take place at
Brown University
on May 2-4, 2010.
Intellectual Issues:
As Marcel Mauss observed long ago, gift-giving is a complex social activity. Traditionally, the gift-giving practices of the Mediterranean basin and West Asia during antiquity have been studied in isolation from each other and with little theoretical framing. Study, for example, of the Greek practice of euergesia is sometimes contrasted with Roman patronage or invoked as relevant for understanding a donation to a local temple, synagogue, or church that was duly commemorated in an inscription, but is rarely seen as part of a wider cultural phenomenon and social activity. This conference will seek to consider the wide range of gift-giving activities in antiquity as a single phenomenon whose appreciation can be greatly enhanced by both cross-cultural comparisons and theoretical applications.
The focus of the conference will be on the Mediterranean region in antiquity, although both the region and precise dates under consideration are being left a little fuzzy. This investigation has both synchronic and diachronic aspects, recognizing on the one hand that the cultural activity of gift-giving was fluid while, on the other, remaining sensitive to historical continuities. Ancient communities received and transformed earlier texts, traditions, and institutions, and surely a rich understanding of these transformations requires consideration of what came earlier.
This conference thus has synchronic, diachronic, and theoretical dimensions. Topics that might be addressed include:
- How might anthropological perspectives of “the gift” (Mauss’s has been extensively discussed and critiqued) contribute to understanding antique gift-giving activities? Does the specific historical data from antiquity challenge these theoretical explanations?
- In any given gift-giving transaction there were up to five potential agents: the giver, the receiver, the mediator (e.g., monarch, priest, bishop), the divinity (who might command or reward the act), and the audience (e.g., the reader of the commemorative inscription). In different gift-giving activities how do these agents interact, and can we learn anything more theoretically and generally from these interactions?
- Gift-giving activities offer a widely accessible pious activity, one of the few that might have been seen as appropriate for and open to women. How did gender play a role in these activities?
- What was the relationship between the rhetoric of gift-giving in antiquity and its actual practice? Did different communities, presumably with knowledge of and in close contact with the others, develop similar or different activities, and how can this be explained?
- What were the economic dimensions of gift-giving in antiquity?
Participants:
The confirmed participants include:
Zeba Crook (Carleton University)
Stephen D'Evelyn (University of Bristol)
Gregg Gardner (Princeton University)
Anne Katrine Gudme (University of Copenhagen)
Marc Gygax (Princeton University)
Galit Hasan-Rokem (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Susan Holman (Independent Scholar, Boston, MA)
Carlos Norena (University of California, Berkeley)
Ilana Silber (Bar-Ilan University)
Karen Stern (Brooklyn College)
Beate Wagner-Hasel (University of Hannover)
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The conference is being sponsored by the following units at Brown University:
Ancient Studies, Classics, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology in the Ancient World, Judaic Studies, Religious Studies and the Herbert Goldberger Lectureship.
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The conference is being organized by Michael Satlow (Michael_Satlow@brown.edu).